Honou Productions

I owe this one entirely to attending They Might Be Giants' 32nd Anniversary of Flood concert a few weeks before the AWA deadline. While I've owned a copy of the album for many years, I had completely forgotten the song Minimum Wage existed until they played it at the concert. The idea of using The Devil is a Part-Timer popped into my head as I was trying to think of a quick video idea I could do if I didn't think I could finish my other AWA project (Waveform Manipulation) before the deadline.

I actually ended up finishing Waveform Manipulation a day before the deadline, so I decided I'd give speedrunning editing this idea a shot, and managed to knock it together just in time to submit.

I was a bit hampered by the lack of available footage - I only had the first season to work with, and there were a lot fewer scenes of the characters in the restaurant than I remembered there being, but since the song is so short, it ended up working out all right.

A bit of silly fun, a few people really liked it, but it ended up not making the finals in any categories.

Anime - The Devil is a Part-Timer Season 1
Music - They Might Be Giants - Minimum Wage
Completed October 2022

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

During the pandemic, I started watching a lot of YouTube creators, and, in particular, found that I really liked the things made by Tom Scott. His video with the Gregory Brothers about Auto-Tune had me in stitches, and I decided I wanted to see if I could do a video using it. I scoured my collection of discs for sequences of people singing and managed to find more than I expected, though I had hoped for more recent series. Since so many of the usable scenes I'd found were from series with a 4:3 aspect ratio, I ended up doing the whole video 4:3, cropping all of the 16:9 footage as needed.

I also broke out After Effects for the first time in a long time to make the waveforms and the tracking effects with the equations (which are all accurate Fourier Transform equations for certain transform types).

It amused a few people in the AWA Pro competition (and at least one person immediately pegged it as mine, saying "you're one of the only people who would try something like this"), but it wasn't selected as a finalist in any category.

Anime - Various Anime
Music - Gregory Brothers ft. Tom Scott - How Auto-Tune Works
Completed October 2022

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

I got introduced to this movie by a GIF on Twitter talking about the animation and how it had inspired the look of Samurai Jack. After watching it, I decided that I needed to make an AMV using it, because it fit my wheelhouse of "obscure old-school source" so well.

After hunting for a useful song for quite a while, I ended up falling back on my old standby of "epic theatrical music" for this one. I originally intended to use several of the fight scenes from across the movie, but I couldn't get the narrative to flow very well, so I cut the idea back to only using the epic final battle sequence against the eight-headed dragon.

It came across all right, but I'd like to revisit the movie again someday and use more of the really cool animation sequences, especially the fire demon fight.

Anime - The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (Wanpaku Ouji no Orochi Taiji)
Music - Epic Score - Their Fight is Our Fight
Completed July 2022

YouTube Link
AnimeMusicVideos.org Link

For some reason, I watch a lot of competitive cooking shows, especially things like Top Chef, Chopped, Cutthroat Kitchen, and Guy's Grocery Games. For Anime Boston's food theme in 2020/2022, I decided to do an opening sort of parodying cooking shows in general. It's cute and silly, but man, I'm a terrible actor.

Video: Original Work
Audio: Bensound.com - Little Idea
Completed May 2022
YouTube Link

I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who for a long time, and my favorite post-reboot Doctor has always been David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor (Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor is still my favorite overall). I originally envisioned this video as including the entire history of the show, but the amount of footage, combined with the lack of good quality footage of the early Doctors had me pare it back to focusing on the Tenth Doctor’s era, with small nods to his predecessors.

The song is one that stuck in my head from the first time I heard it, and I always thought that it spoke to the idea of what we leave behind and how we’re remembered by others, which fit very well with how Tennant’s departure was played in his final episodes.

I was surprised as I was editing with just how many defining moments of the series were done with just reaction shots of characters, especially of Tennant, and that ended up being how the video flowed, which unfortunately made it pretty inaccessible to people who weren’t familiar with the series. Overall, it’s a fun tribute to the era, and I’m glad it came together pretty well.

Video - Doctor Who
Audio - Trans-Siberian Orchestra - What is Eternal (from Beethoven's Last Night)
Completed February 2022

YouTube Link

This was a silly semi-troll video I made in the last day before AWA Pro 2022’s deadline.

I was inspired by a combination of the projector music box in the ending sequence from Sailor Moon R and the music box version of the theme from the PlayStation version of Chrono Trigger.

I bought a generic lift-top box from a craft store and created a wood-texture image of the Chrono Trigger logo in PhotoShop to print out and place in the box lid to serve as the “music box.”

The winding of the "box" was mimed, with the sound effect recorded from an actual music box I own.

Because the lid opened flat, I had to hide something behind the box to hold the lid about vertical after setting it on the table, so the reason my hands went out of frame after setting the box down was to hide the cut bit of video showing me place that brace behind the box before pulling my hands out of frame again. One the box was open, I left it open long enough for the song to play before closing it again.

Then I placed a deliberately low-quality pico projector on the table in place of the box and recorded it showing the animated loop of images from the game from the same camera position.

Once I had both sequences, it was a fairly simple task to mask the two pieces together. I did discover that at one point, I had accidentally leaned too far forward and my head had gotten in frame, but thankfully a second mask was able to hide that.

Since Pro is supposed to be blind, I even went so far as to take off my watch and wedding ring to hide my identity a bit better.

People in Pro were curious if the box was actually a projector or not, so this served its purpose. Probably not something I'll try again very soon, though.

Video - Original Short, Chrono Trigger PS1
Audio - Yasunori Mitsuda - Chrono and Marle (Arranged Version 1) (from Chrono Trigger)
Completed September 2021

YouTube Link

I’ve been a fan of the .hack franchise since the very beginning, with .hack//SIGN, and I’ve wanted to make a video using the original quartet of games for quite a few years, but couldn’t find the right song.

A friend of mine suggested a song by Blackmore’s Night as a possibility, but it didn’t quite feel right to me. But the sound of the group definitely caught my ear, so I listened to a few of their albums to see what else they’d done, and stumbled across The Circle. I’d noticed as the various entries of the .hack franchise continued that there were a common group of plot beats that appeared as the setup and introduction for most of them, so the idea of a cyclical story using Aura as the viewpoint character for the song became the base of my idea for the video.

My original idea was to use all of the video incarnations of the story in chronological order (including SIGN, Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, Roots, and Quantum), but I realized that that would result in alternating between cel animation and CG for each entry in the series, so I decided to focus on the CG entries.

To get the footage, the G.U. movie and Beyond the World movie were easy (just ripping Blu-Rays), and the G.U. games thankfully had recently had a remastered re-release on Steam, so the video files were much easier to get than the PS2 versions would have been. The original games were much more difficult, since the cutscenes mostly weren’t stored as video files, but were rendered in-engine. To get them, I ended up using a PS2 emulator configured to upscale the raw frames and then dump them to a video file. Thankfully, I also had an Action Replay to copy my 100% complete file from my actual memory card to the emulator and unlock all of the cutscenes so I didn’t have to play through the whole series on the emulator (I had over 125 hours of play on the save file).

I also had to decide how to handle the various aspect ratios in the footage. Luckily, the three distinct periods of the video were all consistent with each other (the original games were 4:3, the G.U. movie and games were both 16:9, and the Beyond the World movie was 21:9), so I decided to keep each of them at their native ratios and animate letter/pillarboxing as needed to keep the video project at 16:9, which worked out pretty well, in my opinion.

Execution-wise, I think this video is pretty good, though the pacing, particularly of the first segment, could be better - it’s a rather slow introduction.

This got a decent reaction from several other editors in AWA Pro 2021, but ultimately didn’t receive any finals nominations.

Anime - .hack Franchise (.hack//INFECTION, .hack//MUTATION, .hack//OUTBREAK, .hack//QUARANTINE, .hack//G.U. Trilogy, .hack//G.U. Last Recode, .hack//Beyond the World
Audio - Blackmoor's Night - The Circle
Completed September 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the second half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix 2 event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the audio track (no video) and the title of the video to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

I was given the audio and title from Opner’s Just the Good Times video, and I still had I Want to Eat Your Pancreas ripped from the first Iron Remix handy, so that’s what I went with as my combo, focussing on the happy moments of the movie and avoiding the heavier dramatic moments.

It was a fun one to make and came out pretty nicely, I think.

Anime - I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Audio - Ichika Nito - When you hit 1million subscribers
Completed July 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the first half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix 2 event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the audio track (no video) and the title of the video to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

A conversation in Discord about Cool Runnings had had the track from the final run in the movie stuck in my head for several weeks, so I decided to do a sports video and chose the Battle Athletes OVA for my video source.

This was pretty rushed, even for an Iron Chef video, but I think it at least came out pretty coherently.

The audio and title were remixed in the second half of the event by Katranat for their video.

Anime - Battle Athletes OVA
Audio - Hans Zimmer - The Walk Home (from Cool Runnings)
Completed July 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the second half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the video track (no audio) and a theme to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

I was given the video to Troubleclef’s “Battletits” and the theme of Action as the base for my video.

Since the source video was so short, I needed an even shorter piece of music, which took me quite a while to find. I ended up settling on a snippet from the soundtrack to The Wizard of Speed and Time.

It’s not my best work, but with the limited source and time, it still came out pretty well.

Anime - Keijo!
Audio - John Massari - Wizard Run (from The Wizard of Speed and Time)
Completed April 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link